Midnight at the Pera Palace_The Birth of Modern Istanbul

by Charles King

  In many ways Eitingon had the ideal background for a Soviet agent, especially for someone working in an era long before the clear battle lines of the Cold War had been imagined. For more than a generation his family had cultivated the ability to live in many places at once. Eitingon was part of the extended family of Chaim Eitingon, a prominent Russian-Jewish furrier. The elder Eitingon had built up a fur-trading empire that stretched across the Russian Empire and abroad. When the empire ended, his family remained the principal conduit for the Soviet fur business, a major source of wealth for the new regime.

  From Moscow to Leipzig to New York, the family oversaw an import–export firm that weathered the Russian civil war and remained lucrative well into the 1930s, when the Depression and the Stalinist nationalization of key industries shut off the spigot. Chaim’s son, Max, had grown up in the midst of a wealthy central European and Jewish world. He was the emblem of a family that had reinvented itself within a single generation, moving from the edges of a Russian shtetl to the European beau monde. Trained as a doctor, Max went on to become one of Sigmund Freud’s earliest acolytes and the chief codifier of Freudian training in psychoanalysis.

  Max’s cousin, Leonid, was from the less-wealthy branch of the Eitingon clan. Born in 1899 in the Mogilev district in what is today Belarus, he was the son of a minor bourgeois factory owner and followed the path of many upwardly mobile Jewish young men in the waning days of the Russian Empire: he joined the communists, at first signing on with the Socialist Revolutionary Party and then, after the Bolshevik coup, enlisting in Trotsky’s Red Army. In the civil war, he fought to root out counterrevolutionaries in his native district as a member of the Cheka, Lenin’s secret police, a job that he seems to have carried out ruthlessly. He was the first generation of good soldiers fighting for the new socialist motherland and, in those days, for world revolution as well—an outcome that Lenin, Trotsky, and other Bolshevik leaders believed was all but inevitable.

  Shortly after the end of the civil war, Leonid Eitingon was assigned to foreign intelligence work in Harbin, a Chinese city that was in many ways the East Asian equivalent of Istanbul at the time. It harbored a large community of former White Russians who had chosen to escape east, rather than south, as Bolshevik armies swept through the old empire. Like Istanbul, it was both cosmopolitan and a hotbed of espionage and intrigue, a small island of old Russian culture in a foreign sea. Eitingon’s activities—gathering information, turning Whites to the Bolshevik side, and quite possibly arranging the assassination of key leaders in the White community—eventually raised the ire of the Chinese authorities, who, like the Turks, were reluctant to see their country become a battleground for someone else’s disputes. When Chinese police broke into the Soviet Consulate in Harbin and searched its files, Eitingon’s true identity as a secret police agent was discovered. He was sent packing to Moscow.

  In 1929, when he was transferred to Istanbul, Eitingon was immediately placed in charge of the real prize in Soviet foreign espionage: keeping an eye on the aging exile who had recently taken up residence on Büyükada. It was a sign of Eitingon’s fine-tuned political sense that he managed to weather his time in Turkey without acquiring even a hint of Trotskyite leanings. One of the professional hazards of being stationed in Istanbul and monitoring the Soviet regime’s archenemy was that the assignment placed an agent in the dangerous position of possibly being turned himself—brought over to the Trotskyite camp and made an informant for the man sitting in isolation on the island. In the 1930s, when Stalin began his purge of the Soviet bureaucracy, at least one former Istanbul agent, Yakov Bliumkin, was dismissed and executed for having gone over to the Trotskyites. There is no evidence that Trotsky’s supporters ever managed to engage in such counterespionage on a large scale, but authorities in Moscow clearly feared the magnetic power of Trotsky’s personality and ideas.

  Eitingon, however, survived the Stalinist purges untainted. After leaving his Istanbul assignment, he was placed in charge of espionage operations in western Europe, serving as one of the most experienced and highest-ranking secret operatives working abroad. He briefly served as case officer for Guy Burgess, the famous British traitor and member of the so-called Cambridge Five spy ring. During the Spanish Civil War, Eitingon served as the Stalinist secret police’s deputy head of mission in Spain, training legions of commandos to fight the rightist forces of Francisco Franco and developing a friendship—perhaps even more—with a young Spanish communist named Caridad Mercader. Like Eitingon, Mercader was the product of a bourgeois family and someone whose own political convictions had pushed her into the anticapitalist camp. She had signed up with the anarchists and, after the defeat of the Left by Franco, fled with Eitingon to Moscow. Eitingon’s experience in Spain, his reputation for efficient work throughout Europe, and his personal relationship with Caridad all recommended him to head up a new operation that would soon unfold half a world away.

  On a late August afternoon in 1940, Eitingon found himself in one of two cars idling on a dusty street on the fringes of Mexico City. He was monitoring an asset, much as he had done many years earlier in Istanbul. The asset was Ramón Mercader, Caridad’s handsome son, but things were not going well. Eitingon knew that relying on Ramón was a shaky way to run a mission.

  Three years earlier, Eitingon had personally trained him as a commando and dispatched him to the front lines against Franco’s army, only to have him return wounded and gun shy. He was indecisive and given to nervous sweats. His only real advantage in the current operation was the fact that he had managed to ingratiate himself with the person who lived in the walled compound down the block, an old man whom Eitingon had personally given the Russian code name of “Utka,” the Duck. That personal connection was important, since Ramón’s mission was to kill him.

  A house alarm was sounding. Dogs were barking. There was a commotion behind the front gate. The backup plan had been for Ramón to use his revolver if the mission went awry, but the absence of gunfire meant that even the fallback plan had gone badly. Eitingon ordered the cars to depart, leaving the assassin to find his own way out of the mess he seemed to have made. It was not until sometime later, once Eitingon was safely back in the Soviet Union, that he learned the details of what had happened.

  That day, August 20, Ramón had arrived much as he had done each afternoon, parking his car outside the compound and waving at the armed guards to let him in. He made his way to the study where the old man sat working on a text. Minutes later, he pulled out a short-handled ice ax he had concealed in his raincoat and brought it down on the back of Leon Trotsky’s head.

  Trotsky let out a piercing cry, so loud that Eitingon might well have heard it down the street. Natalya rushed into the study to find the two men separated, Trotsky leaning against a doorway and Ramón looking on dazed, seemingly surprised that the initial blow had not killed him.

  Blood was everywhere. Trotsky’s guards burst in and grabbed Ramón, nearly pummeling the young man to death before Trotsky could order them to stop. Ramón’s testimony, after all, might be used to uncover who had planned the attack. Trotsky was still able to speak when an ambulance delivered him to a nearby hospital. “I don’t want them to undress me. I want you to do it,” he told Natalya before slipping into a coma. He died the following evening.

  As Eitingon sped away, he could not have known that his career had just reached the high point from which he would begin a very long fall. Eitingon had the distinction of being the only Soviet agent whose own career had bookended Trotsky’s exile. He had arrived in Istanbul around the same time as Trotsky and then personally planned the attack that would liquidate him eleven years later. For his service, he and Caridad were awarded the Order of Lenin in a private ceremony in the Kremlin—he as the chief conspirator and she as the mother of the literal hatchet man. Ramón, ever the sap, spent the next twenty years serving a murder sentence in a Mexican prison.

  By the early 1950s, however, Eitingon had fallen from grace. He was accused of play
ing a central role in the Doctors’ Plot, an alleged conspiracy by Soviet physicians, many of whom happened to be Jewish, to assassinate key Soviet leaders. In reality, the plot was a fabrication spurred on by Stalin’s paranoia over internal enemies, but the effort to unmask the supposed conspirators produced a frenzied antisemitic campaign that targeted senior Jewish communists. Eitingon was arrested, stripped of his medals, and jailed. He was eventually released but spent the rest of his life, until his death in 1981, as an outcast from the intelligence services, working as an interpreter. “There is one small guaranteed way not to end up in jail under our system,” Eitingon once joked to his boss. “Don’t be a Jew or a general in the state security service.” The old Bolshevik mastermind, who had quietly hounded Trotsky from Istanbul to Mexico City, of course was both, and he died in his own kind of internal exile.

  QUEEN

  Under scrutiny, early 1930s: A contestant poses for judges in a Miss Turkey competition.

  BY THE TIME LEON TROTSKY left Büyükada for France and Mexico, Nâzım Hikmet was serving one of his many jail sentences, Halide Edip was in voluntary exile with her husband, Prodromos Bodosakis-Athanasiades was on his way to becoming Greece’s greatest industrialist, and Mustafa Kemal had fully consolidated his power as unrivaled leader of the Turkish Republic. Debates over socialism and republicanism, patriotism and feminism, loyalty and leadership had pushed Istanbullus in separate directions. They could even cause old comrades to part ways. Yunus Nadi, for example, had been Halide Edip’s partner in establishing the Anatolian News Agency, but from that point forward, their careers diverged. Where Halide became one of the regime’s foremost critics, Yunus Nadi was one of its most committed spokesmen.

  He had worked as a newsman already in the late Ottoman period and had briefly served in the Ottoman parliament. His credentials as a reform-oriented publicist and bitingly effective writer were impeccable. He had been part of the Unionist underground, and, when Mustafa Kemal’s resistance movement emerged, he was one of the early enthusiasts who fled from Istanbul to Ankara to join it. After the proclamation of the republic, he returned to Istanbul and became the city’s leading newspaper editor and press entrepreneur. He could be fierce in criticizing specific government policies or the inefficiencies of state institutions, but he always did so from inside the circle of power around the president and his core associates.

  The newspaper Yunus Nadi established in 1924, Cumhuriyet, quickly rose to become one of Turkey’s most widely read dailies and a mainstay of ardent Kemalism. Its opinion pages could both reflect and sway public attitudes. Foreign governments carefully scoured its pages for evidence of Turkey’s shifting foreign-policy orientations—from early flirtations with the Soviet Union to admiration for Adolf Hitler’s growing power in Germany. Turkey was modernizing, and Cumhuriyet was there both to record the revolution and to champion it. “For four or five years now, Turkey has been in a period of deep restructuring,” Yunus Nadi declared in its pages in 1928. “We want to import all traits of Western civilization to our country. Not long ago . . . our social life rested on Eastern principles. We are turning them upside down.”

  Round and jowly, he wore his gray hair swept back severely. In broad-lapelled suits and the occasional wing collar, he could seem a cartoon of a press mogul, a Turkish version of Citizen Kane. He could rail on the page and gently persuade in person. Both of those skills came into play when he hit upon an idea for expanding newspaper sales and showcasing the new sense of modernity that Kemalism had brought to the ancient city. In February 1929, Yunus Nadi announced that Istanbul would host the republic’s first ever beauty contest.

  “Why Wouldn’t We Do the Same?” a front-page headline asked. Since all civilized countries held beauty contests, with the winners competing in international pageants across Europe and the United States, a similar competition would mark another milestone in Turkey’s march toward social maturity. The newspaper soon announced a search for “the most beautiful Turkish woman,” who would be selected to represent Turkey abroad and demonstrate the elevated qualities of the new republican woman to a global audience. It would be no different from a soccer game, Yunus Nadi said, a chance to send the best Turkish citizens overseas and to measure themselves against the finest products of other civilized nations. Further particulars followed. All Turkish women and girls over the age of fifteen, regardless of religion or ethnicity, were invited to participate. Contestants were asked to send in a photograph, which would be printed in the newspaper, and readers would have a chance to vote on the finalists. There would be no swimsuit element, the newspaper explained, and the jury would consist only of the most respected citizens. Prostitutes were expressly forbidden from taking part.

  In a country with one party, one leader, and one acceptable path to the future, being asked to vote freely on anything was a novelty, and Yunus Nadi’s idea had its desired effect. Photographs flowed into the newspaper’s editorial offices. Readers debated the merits of the various finalists. The Turkish winner should have a good chance of beating out other contestants in an international pageant, one writer declared. The recent winner of a European contest had been a Hungarian woman, and since Turks and Hungarians were genetic cousins—both descended from Central Asian nomads, apparently—odds were in the republic’s favor. The discussions were so intense that few people in Istanbul probably noticed the arrival of another celebrity, Leon Trotsky, in the same week the competition was announced.

  After readers had selected around thirty finalists, the first competition was held at the newspaper’s editorial offices. A jury of fifty notables examined each of the women, who were required to wear a décolleté dress and to produce an identity document certifying their Turkish citizenship. By September 3, the results were in, and Cumhuriyet dedicated the entire front page to describing the competition and its winner, one Feriha Tevfik. The young woman rocketed from obscurity to fame in an instant. She went on to an international competition in Belgium, but despite Yunus Nadi’s high expectations, she failed to place. Still, moguls of Turkey’s emerging film industry came calling. She went on to star in several melodramas and romantic films, a well-known figure if not exactly a household name through much of the 1930s.

  Yunus Nadi soon announced that the competition would be an annual event. Beginning in 1930, twenty finalists would be invited to a grand ball at the Turquoise club, where they would parade before judges and paying guests in the style of other foreign pageants. “Beauty Is Not Something to Be Ashamed Of,” an editorial headline read. All of this was still shockingly new, however. Yunus Nadi had had to defend the contest from the moment he originally broached the idea, and the negative reaction began to swell. He found himself managing an enormous backlash, not only from conservatives in Istanbul society but also from the Turkish government. When judges selected Naide Saffet, a Turkish schoolteacher, as Miss Turkey 1931, the Ministry of Education issued a circular threatening dismissal for any teachers and pupils who participated in such contests. Teachers in particular were held up as models of propriety and good sense—and were, to boot, state employees—so having one of their number placed before ogling judges was considered an offense to public morality.

  Even worse, Yunus Nadi had failed to deliver the most important thing he had promised: that in bending good taste by staging a beauty contest that included Muslim women, he would at least produce someone who could go on to win an international crown. Three years of entrants fell by the wayside when they stepped onto stages in Belgium and France. The title of Miss Europe 1930 had gone to the entrant from Greece, trouncing her Turkish competitor and delivering a major blow to national prestige. It was at this point that Yunus Nadi seems to have come up with an inspired idea. If beauty contests were seen by conservatives as somehow beneath the dignity of Muslim women—in part because the winners had gone on to film or acting careers, which were still considered a sign of loose morals and déclassé origins—one way to solve that problem would be to put forth a contestant whose background wa
s itself beyond reproach. The person he found was Keriman Halis.

  Keriman was only ten years old when the republic was declared, but for families such as hers, the fall of the Ottoman Empire was less the end of an old way of life than a rising wave that, with the right planning and connections, could lift fortunes and redefine opportunities. Her great-grandfather had been eyhülislam of the Islamic community. He was, next to the sultan in his role as caliph, the most powerful religious leader in the entire empire. Her grandfather had been a pasha, a senior general in the imperial land forces. Her father, Halis Bey, was a merchant who built a successful business in the late nineteenth century when Ottoman consumers were hungry for items that marked them as modern and European. He had been among the first importers to introduce fire extinguishers to the empire and, in a way, helped alleviate what had been one of Istanbul’s preeminent problems for centuries.

  With such a pedigree, Keriman spent her childhood among French nannies, equestrian outings, and the social season of balls and chaperoned excursions. With a round face and sparkling brown eyes, she was regarded as a considerable beauty, and the family home in Fındıklı, on the European shore of the Bosphorus, was a place of quick conversation and optimism about the future. Her father’s passion for literature and the arts meant that she was surrounded by a cadre of Muslim writers, artists, and thinkers who were helping to reshape the city in the transition from Allied occupation to national sovereignty. It was an atmosphere similar to the one that Halide Edip, three decades Keriman’s senior, had known in her own childhood, but the differences were also stark. Halide had been a member of the first generation of women whose adult lives spanned the turbulent years from empire to republic. Their struggles had been over veiling, seclusion, and civil rights. Keriman’s generation, by contrast, took the new public lives and legal status of women for granted. They were the first cohort of young women who, as adults, had known no country but the Turkish Republic.